The rear drainage hatch of Old Cauldron Workshop was an iron-banded shutter two feet square. He opened directly into the dark stone cleft that dropped toward the Leech Mire.
For thirty years, it had been used only to vent dirty lye water and dump cold ash into the gorge canal. But on the morning following Pei Jing’s harvest, the hatch became the end-post node of an independent supply cooperative.
At noon, the Three-Legged Mottled Brass Cauldron was charged with the freshly harvested swamp botanicals:
- Ten pounds of wild Bitter-Gall Reed, snapped into twelve-hair-fraction ribbons along the transverse grain to protect the volatile alkaloid sacs. - Six pounds of five-year Sulfur Aconite, desulfurized with burning lime powder and buffered with white lime-chalk. - Four pounds of wild Miasma-Cleansing Fern, sun-dried over the side chimney pipes. - One fluid ounce of the Ghost-Spotted Water Viper venom harvested the night before from the cut serpent skull.
Gui sat beside the stone base, his hickory cane resting against his knee. He watched with intense fascination as Pei Jing measured the amber venom with a tuned glass dropper.
“Viper venom in a lung lozenge,” Gui muttered, his yellow eyes wide. “In the Cloud Mist Sect, a potion-maker who added snake venom to a cleansing pill would be beaten by the punishment elders for practicing demonic witchcraft.”
